Lisle Library's Booked For The Day Book Discussion Blog

Summary of December meeting

On Monday, December 13th the Booked for the Day met to discuss The Turn of the Screw by Henry Miller. Here are some of the things we talked about during the meeting.

-We started off our discussion by pointing out that this was a difficult book to get through and that it was not our favorite book.

-The general consensus in the group was that too many things were left without resolution and many parts in the book were hard to understand. Some attendees commented how they had to re-read portions of the book twice to try and understand it better.

-We talked about the beginning of the book and how it was an interesting way to start the book. There were some comments made that the beginning was easier to understand and how we almost kept hoping to go back to those characters to see how they reacted to the end of the story.

-We talked about the governess and how odd it had been that she was so infatuated with both her employer and the children. Even at the very beginning when she did not know the children well she thought them to be perfect.

-Very early on we started to discuss whether the ghosts were real or if they were in the governess’ imagination. We thought the governess was pretty unstable and that as a result she might be seeing things.

-There was an argument made that the governess is able to describe Quint before she ever knew about him, however, another person pointed out that she gave a very vague description of him and the housekeeper jumped in right away to agree with her.

-We also noticed that whenever the governess would see a ghost it would never talked to her but when she described the encounter she would say it spoke to her.

-We talked about Miles and how we did not understand why he was kicked out of school. One person mentioned that it might have been for stealing another mentioned that it was because he had been telling things to other students. People who read the introduction mentioned how the author mentions that there were sexual overtones to why Miles got kicked out, however no one attending the meeting was able to get this from reading the book.

-We also talked about Miles’ death and none of us was able to fully understand why he died. We did talk about during this time period many people died suddenly.

-Overall our dislike of the book came from our lack of understanding of the text and the event. There was too much ambiguity throughout the book for us to understand the whole story.

These are a few of the comments made during the meeting, please feel free to add you own in the comments section.

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